The Pupa Woman (I.III)
Chapter 1:3
Hello DEAR READER,
The following is Chapter 1:3 from my first novel, The Pupa Woman. You can read Chapter 1:2 here.
You can get the PDF over at my gumroad! ^_^
Available from our unfortunate tech-overlords over at Amazon both in paperback and eBook.
Susie looks upward towards the pipes & protrusions which hint at a possible path, leading up towards an opening into the wider court-yard closed off by a heavy steel door. She looks to her left… to her right, watching closely the corners of the shaded path-ways closely hugged by the imported hawthorn & arborvitae hedges. An attempt in trying to pull herself up towards a grated window resulted in a painful fall bottoms-first onto the stone-padded walkway, an almost-comical splat sound escaping from her body at impact. She was never great at climbing or hopping over things, acquiring her most intimate pictures through devious implementations of ninja infiltration tactics and a curious ability to somehow become one with her disguise– sometimes if they weren’t looking close-enough, she could form herself into the person to whom the clothing belonged and become indistinguishable amongst the crowd. Now she’s nursing her ass and thinking of a way to trespass which didn’t involve so much awful physical activity, trying to fit her canvas sneakers into small nooks & crannies while using a drain-sprout as leverage. Over & over she falls flat on her behind and screams out a curse-word before quickly putting her hands over her mouth as if she could stop the sound from traveling any further.
As she pulls herself up, there is a distinctive sound of purring, growing ever larger and at first she clutches at her stomach but then realizes it’s not her… no it’s the most beautiful little white cat she’s ever seen, approaching Susie with an inquisitive spark in its eyes which shimmer with a brilliant olive sheen. What pretty little pawsies it has, Susie thought to herself as she almost instinctively reached for the mooncake in her pocket and offered it within the palms of her two hands. The little kitty-cat squinted with its eyes and approached the mooncake, taking a cursory sniff before pulling on the mooncake with its teeth and chomping at its sweet innards… oh dear, Susie said to herself at the sight of the pussycat’s two fluttering tails which revealed themselves like a charmed snake. The kitty grabbed globules of the cake’s innards and placed them in its mouth with regal calm as if savoring instead of devouring, then turning its head upwards and with an understanding look and a consoling paw on the hand it demanded Susie’s attention. “Mmm tiramisu… you have good taste,” and Susie’s eyes almost rolled back into her skull with her arms holding her up as she feels herself falling over backwards.
Holy shit, she’d say, the puddycat is talking to me: “Call me Princess Casio,” she says as she rubs her body up against Susie’s trembling hand with deep purrs. “You’ve shown me kindness so I shall do the same,” the puss-puss says before making a powerful trill sound which resounds throughout the stone ground and provokes leaf rumbling & rustling from the clipped hedges. Susie rubs her eyes, her jaw hanging from its joints as not one, not two, but three separate little kitty-cat faces broke through the leaves, standing at attention except for the smallest one which tries but fails to hold onto a branch and tumbles down onto the soil with a sharp meow and a thud. Princess Casio pulls on the little brown-spotted kitten by its neck with her teeth, forcing it back onto its paws. “Tandy,” the regal cat-in-charge demands with a strident voice– “pull yourself together,” and the little brown-spotted Siamese kitten sucks in its tummy and salutes Susie who at this point is in a mild delirium overwhelmed by the collective cuteness, wanting to hug all the kitties and feel their soft fur on her face, while the neural network goes into the highest of ontological alerts. The other two cats move out from the canopy of the hedges, trusting yet cautious in their demeanor. “Sharp and Atari,” who respond to the Princess’ instructions with attentive nods– “find me a way into this building… extra helping of mooncake for whoever’s first,” and the cats all jump into multiple directions with Sharp tracing the path from window-to-window while Atari uses paper refuse to sketch with her nails a floor plan with details regarding each potential entry-way– all the while the Princess herself explaining that they’d gotten their curious names from the cardboard boxes they’d adopted as their homes.
It’s Tandy who guides Susie onto the nearby telephone pole with its looming shadow falling onto the walls and tells her to grasp the black wire attached to the pole which felt dangerous under her sweaty touch. She pulls herself towards the cable and lets her weight fall, letting the end snap ‘n trying to ignore the terrible burning sensations on her fingers while watching the other cats below wave with mooncake crumbles dangling from their whiskers. She picks up speed and holds her feet up while trying to cradle her fragile camera, guiding herself over the steel door above which the telephone cabling runs– but shit she screams as she slips and lands head first onto the stone pavement once again with that familiar cold exterior.
She pulls herself up and nurses her head, touching the spot where it hurts and looking at her hand to see if there was any blood and as she does this, she realizes she’s surrounded by four officers of the law, looking all authoritative with their batons, leather belts, and white gloves. One of them pokes Susie’s back with the tip of a boot and a malevolent chuckle. Susie didn’t do well with cops, something about the camera and the hair made her a big open target– as if she had a sign on her back saying “kick me! please” and well that’s what they did and she held her camera in her arms and tried to make herself as small as possible. They took turns with large striding movements of the leg, grunting to accentuate their impacts– yes it fucking hurt so much with Susie trying to stop the tears and the cries of pain escaping from her mouth. Through the ringing in her ears she hears laughter, ugly cackles sometimes interrupted by heavy breathing … stopping the violence only to point and make assumptions… as if she should feel ashamed for having her ass kicked in the first place. “Let’s take it and smash it up,” Susie heard one behind her say as a disembodied foot prodded the surface of her tense & sore back. “Look at how ugly this she-creep is,” trying to keep her head down as a hand pulls on her hair. Try to think of a happier place, try to think of Sylvie and the peaceful way she’d snore while snoozing on the table with her head right next to the soup and the way you’d slurp just a little quieter… just don’t break down, she tells herself even though she was sick of being told what to do, squeezing herself into a ball like an armadillo every-time an anti-creep wanted to get physical. Susie felt another foot in her rib and she can’t stop herself from falling onto her side, still cradling the camera in her arms like it was some fragile child who might cry, who did cry… well actually, at that point she realized the cries were not her own and they grew louder as the pitter-patter of heeled shoes picked up a quick tempo.
“What on earth are you doing? Stop it, stop it now!” Susie felt warmer hands, broad fingers gripping on her shoulders, the unmistakable stench of flowery perfume. The police officers withdrew themselves with backward steps, outranked by her saving angel who felt so warm to the touch and Susie felt herself be hugged close with her nose and face becoming lost in a beige sweater-vest’s fabric which dried her tears. “Is this a friend of yours, ma’am” but the warm body barked another command, another shriek and the police officers backed away and Susie could sense their disappearance one-by-one, hoping to be held even tighter by this lovely guardian who might carry both of them to girl-creep heaven. She looked up and saw a woman with eyeliner-stains flowing down from swollen eyes and an empathic expression which studied Susie’s face as hands felt at her roughened cheeks. “Are you okay, miss…” and Susie felt the edges of her camera with fingers searching for cracks & holes.
“Yeah… thanks for… saving me, lady.” The woman introduces herself as Duchess Autumn-Leaf and she pulled on Susie’s arm as the legs came back into action, their nerve endings running up her spine with incredible heat… wanting to say “oh no” and drop herself into the Duchess’ wrinkled arms but instead letting herself be held and walking along as they strolled through a carefully-tended garden full of pretty tulips and sunflowers. “Oh,” the Duchess said with a bit of a smile and a soft melancholic voice… “I took it upon myself to tend the garden a bit. It used to be gravel.” Really pretty flowers lady, though only a half-sneeze came out of Susie’s mouth as she tried to guard herself from the pollen. “Let’s get you some water,” letting herself be taken along into the record studio’s dark hallways while the inner-courtyard windows of the apartments fade into the golden sunlight behind them.
Susie sipped on the salty spring water she’d been given as she sat on a desk, happy enough to have gotten so far. The camera revealed far-more than it should have but hey, maybe she was just a nice lady; not wanting to call security and escort out a girl-creep journo covered with bruises for all to see so for now let’s just keep it quiet. She looks down onto the surface of the clear water in the plastic cup, waiting for a drop of blood to spill from her nose and mix into its translucent body. The Duchess pulls a pill from her sleeve and swallows it down with some water, making a big gulping sound before taking the opportunity to speak. “I know why you’re here… it’s true what they say, you really can smell celebrity-hunters,” the only words she gets herself to say until once again another period of dead-space hangs in the air. Susie hears the hum of florescent lights and the sounds of loud voices muffled by walls in the background– outside these thick walls something major was happening, just loud enough to penetrate the isolating concrete which formed the walls of the Oriana Music Group’s perimeter. “They say that?” Susie asked.
“I don’t understand myself,” the Duchess looking up ‘n down Susie’s body. “Maybe it’d kill me to not tell someone,” as if she wasn’t convinced the wounded creature could ever gather an audience greater than four alley cats– “I know you’re looking for her.”
Susie had a hesitant look on her face for a sec. while trying to parse the statement. She wasn’t quite sure who the Duchess was at this point. Office shaman? A local eccentric? That thought culminated into a very stupid sounding “uh” which squirmed its way out through a barely-opened jaw… Susie now analyzing the situation and searching for exits, hoping more police officers weren’t hiding behind the corners decorated by metal desks and file-cabinets.
“Don’t look at me like I’m crazy. I hate it when people think I’m crazy,” the Duchess drawled with none of the warmth she’d had before and Susie followed her into her office out of fear that any other door might result in a vicious lion-attack. Instead, she was struck by the portraits which covered the wooden-paneled walls. There was one immaculately framed next to a bookcase, a much younger Duchess with cat-like streaks of eyeliner and pretty black lipstick pushing her head up against a mustached man with a porkpie hat holding a trumpet– at the other side there was a poster, look closely and you’ll recognize the broad hands and the strands falling alongside a beautiful evening-gown underneath cursive handwriting which spelled out “With love, Toshiko” … the Duchess herself at a grand piano with a sly smile and a sharp face and long silky black hair showing well-constructed pearly-whites, prompting a gawking stare of recognition from Susie who couldn’t help it and an awkward laugh from the lady herself.
“That was thirty years ago. I was a big deal to young jazz-lovin’ creeps, or at least the one who sent me that… might have considered myself a role-model at some point,” though the Duchess was too busy straightening the pictures to look into Susie’s admiring eyes. “They stopped showing up pretty soon though. Maybe ‘cuz I’m a sell-out,” and maybe that meant something to aforementioned jazz creeps but it meant nothing to Susie who’d eked out an entire existence by selling out. Integrity and principles seemed to be resources one had to be born with; no-one would look at a creep in a raincoat with a camera and assume there were principles and integrities to sell in the first place– no-one’s interested in what you’re selling Suz, not when you’d give it away for a particularly bountiful sandwich.
“Teaching kids to sing & dance can make you real jealous sometimes. Sometimes she’d even sing the songs I’d written her. Some fucking fancy child-star. How do you compete with that kind of ability? I get why moms strangle their kids.” Susie realized she’d not said much, continuing not to say much on the assumption that the Duchess would talk enough on her own and maybe having the conviction that Susie wasn’t smart enough to even understand the words she was saying– not entirely incorrect. The Duchess came a bit closer as she folded up her arms.
“But it’s not singing that gets business, uh…” Susie almost said her name. “Ah, Sylvie…” the Duchess smiling as she repeated it. “Nice name… it’s not the singing that counts. it’s the publicity,” the Duchess pointing at Sy-Susie’s camera as she spoke. “It’s all publicity and image– you perfectly understand that, I’m sure.” A creeping suspicion started to breath down her neck, gnawing at the edges of her cognition as memories became uncertainties rather than images. “I think you know what I’m saying,” bitterness apparent on the Duchess’ tongue as she decorates its slimy surface with two more capsules– trying to stop herself from spilling more of the mascara-infused tears which had formed stalactitic outlines on her cheeks.
“She wasn’t a machine you could just use for your own gain. I thought of her as my child.” She handed Susie a large bag of pill bottles and blister-packages from her drawer and placed them into Susie’s raincoat with her wrinkled hand softly patting the warm & dry hiding space as Susie tried to remain calm with her own arms remaining stiff at her side in an effort to maintain plausible deniability. “Doc sez they control battiness and exuberance but I didn’t have the heart to give them to her you know I just used them myself instead. They’re good, but not my thing anymore,” and the Duchess looked so much older now as she shuffled behind her desk and allowed herself to sink into the soft curves of her leather chair as the barbiturates crept at the edges of each axon.
There was another terrible silence except for the tic-tocking of a tabletop clock accompanying Susie’s sputtering thoughts– she took another good look at the Duchess and wondered if she was watching a once-stunning dove’s troubled last flight, pained wing motions leading it to an exhausted ‘n graceless extinction. It was darn depressing, she thought as she munched on her fingernails. The Duchess looked out through the blinds of the windows which casted soft delicate streaks of light onto the surfaces of the office on which excited particles of dust danced to the rhythm of some subatomic beat– there were still tears running down her face while her husky voice remained unaffected as if it were emitted from some speaker deep within her throat. “Got to me before it got to her,” and the Duchess was now feeling quite sorry for herself, Susie supposes– so she walks up to the desk and without knowing what else to do, Susie just patted the Duchess’ head and said “It’ll be alright, nice lady,” which made the Duchess laugh a little bit.
“Yeah, I am a nice lady,” only words said with slurring as she closed her eyes and surrendered her muscles to the pleasant warmth enveloping her nervous system. “Sanyo-Infinity. He’s her manager, the architect really of Judy’s entire existence… he’ll be at a hotel in the early evening celebrating the launch of Judy’s latest single, though everyone will pretend to be mourning I’m sure,” her neck disappearing into the folds of her body.
“I don’t know why you’re telling me this,” Susie sez as she plays with the shutter speed on her camera. She’s rubbing her sneaker onto the carpet out of nervousness, unsure what sort of answer she was expecting. Maybe she was hoping to be affirmed in some way, given a purpose by a quest or a mission.
“You probably think I’m doing you a favor,” the Duchess said with a hoarse laugh tacked on at the end of the sentence, pointing Susie to a business card with the address of the hotel on it. “You’ve duped your way into my life because obviously you value a story and pictures more than you value your own life– which is so damn sad. I’m not helping you; I’m just offloading my responsibility onto you,” and she pulled on a lever on her chair to move the seat back and opened her eyes to watch the steady rotation of the ceiling fan. “I’m sure you have what it takes… if you manage to not get your head smashed into pieces, that is,” book-ended by a nasty cough and another hoarse laugh. Susie stood there for a moment and then turned away, making sure to get one last glimpse of her wonderful guardian angel before it flew elsewhere all riddled with pills, knowing she’d never see this Duchess ever again.
But something still doesn’t feel right. Susie tried to find her way through the office of Oriana Music Group’s in-house record studio, committing the many twists & turns to memory as she keeps walking down the wrong hallway. She knew that a bitter pill-addicted employee committing self-harm out of disgruntlement could never serve as an accurate source of neural clarity yet she could not escape that wonderful feeling of peace she’d get when she’d simply accept that which confirmed her own suspicions and ignored everything else. It’s only then the neurons seemed agile enough to function without producing noise, to not misfire with electrical pulses which seemed to overload the neural net with conflicting ideas. She’d know better than anyone that each story comes at a price, a loss of fidelity as one accepts only that which allows for something coherent to reveal itself from within the pool of noise. At a certain point the synapses exhaust themselves, don’t they Susie? She’s getting tired of her own thoughts now, nibbling on a mooncake she’d been keeping in her pockets just for herself as she resigns to simply opening the doors she finds in the hopes of a way out or a replacement guardian angel with a lantern who could guide her through these dark times… hey, or just somebody to say “that’s right… you’re here! Right where you should be… hmm yes, I know exactly who you are.”
Stairs rose over other stairs, sometimes coiling together like twisted snakes, as if Susie was in the digestive system of some massive concrete & steel creature. She feels it shiver under her feet, following signs etched with meaningless phrases, and her labored breathing bounces across the surfaces surrounding her, rattling like an ear drum. Walkways reached all the way up into the darkness of the black nothingness that formed a ceiling, with florescent rooms stuck into the grey landscape like protruding mountain tops– echoes of her nervous humming bringing the matter around her to life… oh but now it’s a duet– words with high-strung voice sung so sweetly:
“I know you’re willing but please / don’t make me take my sailor suit off.”
The song seems always removed from you, somewhere a fantasy didn’t have to– oh well you know, Susie says to herself. ‘Cuz see, you sings to your internal self, that unspoken agreement guarding the boundaries of what you see when you look into yourself vs. what/who was around you. She’s taking that step towards peeling off the wallpaper, an insulating material which keeps away the fear that all perfection is a temporary defense against an inevitable decline. Strip it to its frame, pull up those weeds– now a creaky wooden framing through which there are no illusions and a real lonely creep right in the middle wishing for a warm blanket… Susie feels at the bag of pills in her front pocket and thinks for a sec. about getting trashed on a handful to escape these awful feelings– to pacify the neural body’s frontal lobe until she realizes she’s got her hands on a bottle with half of her sticking out of a doorway she’d believed would lead her to an exit, drawing the glances of two very pale lookin’ creatures who readjust their thick glasses and take a good peek at what she’s packing.
“Hey beautiful,” one of the creatures said with a gangly pimply voice after switching off the stereo– “you mind sharing those?” Susie was trying to ignore her sweat, squeezing the pill bottle a little bit with her hand as the other creature got up from his seat at a computer terminal and got a little too close for Susie’s liking… it was the large cubes as high as the ceiling which sputtered & blurped with fax-machine sounds behind thick glass, their shining lights and oscillating fans keeping Susie in a state of enraptured excitement about these monolithic machines which looked like lit-up skyscrapers rising up from flat emptiness.
“What is that?” Susie softened her grip and entered the room with the rest of her body, putting one hand up to the glass as streaks of condensation were formed by engrossed breath. One of the creatures folded his arms, sensing an in– parsing all the variables in his head with functions of which its output promised a high Bayesian probability for a pretty little pill and a handful of soft bosom.
“Well, that’s VirtuaIdol,” the creature said as he slithered up next to Susie and joined her staring. “It’s pretty cool. Maybe stick around and we’ll show you what it does,” turning his head to his friend with a shark-toothed smile and an anxious nod. Susie opened the pill bottle and convinced them that the stuff came off an old granny with a weak liver, inviting them to take from her hand two servings of what she’d seen the Duchess put back.
“Aren’t you gonna take some?” one of the gangly creatures interjected. Susie tried her best to arch her hips and swivel her chest somehow, a thoroughly unattractive move which inadvertently highlighted what she’d thought were her most grotesque features– though in the minds of the easily-intoxicated & aroused, perhaps it communicated a cute inexperience with the idea of being desired… and now Susie was trying to justify in her head this horrible turn of events, hoping the seduction of two uh, “youthful girl-lovin’” freaks wouldn’t get out of hand, playing a combat scenario in her head which involved a quick jab to the nose and an unwieldy canvas sneaker to the genitals as she told herself to remain absolutely calm.
“Oh, that’s a cool camera. Minolta?” The other gangly creature gulped and sloshed the pill around his mouth for a second, pulling a bitter expression as he opened a can of beer from an ice-chest kept under the computer terminal.
“Yes,” Susie said, holding the 35mm SLR in front of her head while her knees shook like rattling wooden percussion to the tune of Tropical Island Girl, a nice jaunty tune to which she couldn’t help but also tap her feet to as the lyrics (island girl come with me / to a land in which you’ll be free) streamed into her head without prompt. “It has auto-focus, it’s really useful.”
“What kind of film?” The gangly creature is looking down, admiring the 50mm lens mounted to the frame. “135 film,” Susie answered in a creaky voice. “I tend to use ISO 1600, usually Ektachrome. Most of my photography is at night, and usually my subject moves.”
His friend turns away from the computer terminal with his eyebrows raised, stroking his hairy chin as he approaches. “What do you use it for?” So obviously a rhetorical question and now both of the creatures had excitement and/or lust in their eyes which made Susie laugh a bit nervously as she backed away a little bit and said gee guys, I ask the questions around here, hah, letting them on a few scoops to satiate their natural curiosity for the girl-creep with a camera by drawing from her old stash. They’d ooh and aah at the nude limbs, their blurriness making the subject just generic enough that she could assume any identity– they could be the breasts, the thighs, the neck of anyone.
The cozy mood of those pills, even a couple of sips for Susie, made it hard to balance her burning need to know what’s up with those big machines ‘ya got there with the distant & flirtatious open-ended questioning all femme girl-creeps specialize in. She’d let them wander off into bizarre subjects only tangential related to her vague responses, never taking a moment to stop them as their woozy minds intermingled and fed into one-another with ever-escalating technical speak but just jotting down mental notes and letting the words suspend themselves within the crevices of her imagination.
“Isn’t the whole breadth of the human experience just a summation of information?” One of the gangly creatures nodded in response, stroking the fine hairs of his mustache as he too thought of something interesting to say.
“All of our interactions… language, mathematics, what entertains us, our money; yeah, all of it is expressible in digital binary information. And a machine could store that information, and all you’d need is the right address to plug in and experience it all.” Susie raises her hand like a student and asks what on earth such a thing could mean yet getting no response as the chattering between the two gangly creatures continued without pause. After an agreement on the supremacy of the abstract immaterial, one of them turns to Susie in an effort to explain– almost trying to not condescend while still establishing the techno-philosophical dominance he believed would be erotically stimulating.
“See in the future, entire identities will just mean what information they connect to. Take your name for example, uh…” Susie thought for a second and then wondered if Sylvania was still sleeping with her face hanging off the steering wheel– she told him her name.
“Sylvie, or uh… 0x53796C766965 will comprise of references to information; without it you won’t exist in the future digital world,” to which Susie laughed and took another sip of the now-warmish beer, wishing to seem insouciant & distant.
“And uh, mathematics and money are what are important to you, Mr. computer-creep? Isn’t there more to life than simply a bunch of numbers which exist on a machine?”
The two gangly creatures chortled; the other creature now took the time to clear his throat and finished the explanation while trying to suppress a smile with feigned seriousness.
“It’s not the numbers that matter Sylvie, it’s what they represent. An equation for an abstract geometric shape, like an n-th dimensional object, doesn’t mean anything unless you know what it represents. Without that representation, the binary is just noise by itself, like everything in the analogue world is. It takes an interpretive machine, like our brains or my PC system’s processor to take that noise and turn it into something we can understand. Our world consists only of matter; it’s the machine in our heads which construct it into something meaningful, the information is just the input and it don’t matter where it comes from.”
It was once she’d told them her assignment as a celebrity-hunter that the conversation gravitated towards what she’d really wanted to hear, concerning the big machines which had begun sputtering so loudly that their voices had now reached a sort of constant half-shout as they lounged on the cool floor with spread-out comfort.
“That’s the great thing about VirtuaIdol. There are no unknown conditions, it’s always stable,” one of the gangly creatures said as he opened his belt and relieved his developing beer gut. “The user is always in control, any variable you can imagine. The matter doesn’t change, just its organization. Perfect parity between information and interpretation.”
The other gangly creature croaked a little bit and rubbed an unopened beer can on his quickly-reddening face– “Hair color, personality, what socks she wears, the color of her underwear” and then slipping into a slight snore with his head resting on the floor while a hard-on poked through his jeans.
Susie tried to stop herself from burping, failing as she held her hand up to her mouth. “But what is VirtuaIdol,” trying to make it sound like a philosophical statement rather than an inquiry.
The gangly creature that hadn’t surrendered to a tumescent nap held onto his pants as he got up from the floor and reached for the computer terminal. The monitor flickered into action in response to his key-presses as he typed in the requests for a test execution at a local address. “Those big things you see behind us are computer servers.” Susie’s eyes grew wide in recognition, noting that the user-networks she’d often log onto were also hosted on what were called servers.
“That’s right. That’s where VirtuaIdol lives,” the creature said matter-of-factly with only slight slurs as the terminal loaded the program. “Imagine an army of virtual girls, thousands of them, one for each user… existing not just in one place, but in every place at the same time. It’s a new type of idol, made for the silent world… rather than the bodily one.”
There was a silent world, yes– one which existed not in blood & flesh but with words and streams of information. Its requirement for admission demands the loss of anything like a body or physical space, asking you to become only as real as the sounds which you’d hear coming through the television or the radio or the words which pass through the air and dissipate almost instantaneously after being uttered. In this silent world which lacks space, all are neighbors– peers without physical form or surroundings who become continuous participants in one consciousness, sharing experiences and ideas without any hesitation. Whether by one telephonic tendril or by millions of nodes weighed by constant network traffic, they are all connected to one another. Collectively, they form one entity which arises as a powerful signal, emerging from noise like some awesome bird taking flight as its body leaves the surface of a violent & unforgiving torrent of water which migrates across this immense region of electron states, microwaves, magnetic fields, light pulses and thought.
“Each user who logs onto the network will create their own pop-idol which will then be generated by our programs. They’ll experience something uniquely their own and at the same time being part of a community who can share their experiences and their pop-idols. It’s uh… quite exciting, yeah? Better than any videogirl. Soon enough we’ll have visors and physical appendages which extend into the network, you could interact with VirtuaIdol and do practically anything. We’ve already adapted her to the screen. People say they can’t tell a real idol and a VirtuaIdol apart. She’s perfect in every way, and she’s all yours, nobody else.”
Susie watched the young girl appear on the computer terminal, each row of the screen drawn pixel-by-pixel. She looked closely and believed she was looking at an image of Judy, until the image begun to change– she could recognize parts of herself emerging from within this digital recreation, each row increasingly recognizable as the algorithms continued to generate her body. At first, this digital Susie seemed like a faithful copy… a reflection under which lay profoundness, something within captured a truth open to any spectator… yet this three-dimensional representation of her eventually denatured and grew out of the uniform which no longer reflected a reality but a desire, the limbs becoming too long and too bony and covered with darker hair as the body distorts and bulges up in directions which betray the infidelity of the copy… words of the song she’d heard coming from the stereo early streamed into her head:
“My mother will know where I’ve been / my father will go looking for you at home. Wait till I’m a little older so please / don’t make me take my sailor suit off…”
but now the uniform only pretends to be a reflection when in reality it’s an original creation; Susie could feel at the edges of the skirt and the softness of the socks… realizing that she was only adopting a role… reminded of where she belonged each time she childishly waved in the mirror before class… it was a reshaping of her past which erased any old traces of foreignness, in accordance to images which had manifested themselves on film and on television and on the screen and were played out with each iteration possessing only the subtlest of changes which with each revision further divorcing this creature with its flabby body and its worries and anxieties away from its pointer; to call out her own name at this moment seemed sentimental, as if that name was not another uniform which had to be worn in front of the perpetual audience which was always watching, always judging the way you scrubbed your body or the way you picked your teeth or the way you dressed or the way you minced your words with incorrect vowel lengths and too rounded of lips… it was something deep within her which was inexpressible by that former pointer, and it was somehow only retrievable within this performance which framed itself so perfectly within the irides through which all light passes into the lens as an exposure.